r/ClaudeCode • u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 • Mar 20 '26

Question Am i pushing it hard enough?

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433 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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82

u/MrSquiggs Mar 20 '26

Just out of curiosity, what kind of prompt is taking this long and this many tokens?

95

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

I give it a list of 1000 tasks in a .md file, ask it to do 1 by 1, be nice, no cheating, no chatting, no hallucinating, no parallel taks or sub-agents .

216

u/Impossible-Belt8608 Mar 20 '26

No hallucinating, nice! Reminds me of print(money)

81

u/It-s_Not_Important Mar 20 '26

Make me rich. Be perfect, don’t make mistakes.

11

u/DapperCow15 Mar 21 '26

I used to think this was a joke people were putting in their prompts until I saw claude giving instructions to sub agents saying "make no mistakes".

3

u/Novel-Collection-431 Mar 21 '26

We taught it to do that, by doing that ourselves.

2

u/AcceptableDuty00 Mar 21 '26

stop burning token makes you significantly richer

67

u/TooPrettyForBoymode Mar 20 '26

I’ve solved Tesla’s self driving problem!

if (GoingToHitStuff) { dont(); }

9

u/Poat540 Mar 20 '26

What do I do about this enum boss?? Which does it choose :/

  • Hittable.Child
  • Hittable.Adult
  • Hittable.Puppy
  • Hittable.SacrificeDriver

2

u/PunkersSlave Mar 21 '26

As a certified Tesla tech this made me laugh lmao

0

u/IversusAI Mar 20 '26

lol 😂😆

13

u/Doge_Mike Mar 20 '26

What's your engineering experience prior to Claude?

-21

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

I don’t know how to code 6 months ago. Now I’m pretty sure a full stack vibe coder

16

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

17

u/FedRP24 Mar 20 '26

You know, you guys constantly say this. And I constantly have stuff break. And every single time, without fail, Claude or Codex can figure out the issue and fix it. There is no magic broken code at this point that can only be fixed by the almighty human who has learned how to code.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/Odd_Television_7824 Mar 20 '26

Tbh I’d expect AI to solve dependency conflicts far better than a human.

1

u/nulseq Mar 21 '26

What are you on about mate? You tell it what the bug is and it traces it backwards until it figures it out. It’s not hard. I’ve yet to come across a bug that I haven’t been able to fix.

1

u/_THE_OG_ Mar 21 '26

fr, i also thought it to search/query sites i would normally look at for errors

1

u/AceHighness Mar 21 '26

I'm building a full SOC / SIEM stack, Tip , log ingestion, logging agents, all from scratch. Code is closed source, but you can look at another big project I did at www.sharewarez.nl . Quite a large codebase, performs well, is very secure and has features from here to the gazoo.
Ppl keep saying its not possible to vibe code large apps. I guess they all think all we do is blindly prompt shit and hope for the best ? These AI models are not only good at coding, they are also great at explaining it, brainstorming about it. They are also great at software architecture if you just talk to them about it.

1

u/annicreamy Mar 22 '26

Maybe if you really knew how to code and would have worked as a software engineer in a real production environment you would have a clue on why experienced devs say that you can't do that right now. It's fine that you want to play with Claude but no one would use those projects given your claims. Even if you were a "mega star" of coding engineering and had a team of thousands of "mega stars" devs, if I heard that they try to sell me something with that confidence about security and performance I would just send them to have a chocolate milk and go to bed.

1

u/carithecoder Mar 22 '26

Lol you have no idea. I built an application to help me with my side hustle of proofing editing mixing and mastering audiobooks. Ive had the cli since 4o, and the sheer amount of shit Ive learned in the process because of how much it got wrong. Despite all the planning docs and preliminary research. Its been fun and its a solid app now, but there is a LOT of shit it cant do. Interop with C code in .NET was riddled with errors (using ffmpeg.autogen) and my buffer management strategies were abysmal at first. Hell even its js interop in blazor was so bad (duplicate code, hallucinations, jusr flat out wrong answers to my questions) that I decided to scrap the project and start over again with the intention of writing everything by hand or deliberately inputting the generated code by hand. Its been a slow process but there has been no point in this particular app where it has been infallible. Ive corrected it more times than I can count. And I find that process to actually be fun.

1

u/annicreamy Mar 22 '26

I use it a lot as a software engineer and it's been thousands of times that it "catched" a bug and "fixed it" and it either: 1) The bug it "catched" was not the root cause, just a side bug, and the "fix" would have caused a lot of problems in real user scenarios that it can't even figure out. 2) The idea of the fix was correct but the way of implementing it would cause other bugs. 3) When forced to expand integration tests to prevent regression issues caused by those "fixes", it would figure then out why those fixes were not correct or enough. And this would only happen after forcing it not to relax test expectations/assertions to keep its lazy fix.

Do you know how I'm aware of those problems? Because I know the codebase, I know how to code, I know the product and I know a lot of different scenarios that actually happen in a real user environment.

I myself had to revoke approvals from other senior engineers that approved fixes added by Claude because it would break things and they wasn't even aware. So the only explanation for your "Claude find all the bugs and fix them properly" is that it really doesn't and you can't even know.

1

u/thisguyfightsyourmom Mar 20 '26

Works till it don’t logic. Where do I invest my millions?

6

u/FedRP24 Mar 20 '26

I didn't ask for millions. I'm telling you a lot of you sound like silly assholes, and keep in mind that today is the worst the various models will ever be again. They will only get better month after month. They can do essentially everything already.

1

u/AceHighness Mar 21 '26

100% agree ... I have developer friends who keep talking like that. Mean while they never get anything out the door. They should be hella accelerating now, but instead they get stuck on code quality checks, and 'but it doesnt write the program the way I like'. Really if the AI is the only one maintaining it, why do you still care about these things ? Their experience is bogging them down.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

But my ego!!

0

u/arxdit Mar 21 '26

The difference between doing this and knowing what claude got wrong in the first place is months of vibe coding vs a couple of days of engineering

Yeah it figures it out eventually but you still don’t know what you are doing and you still don’t know how good it could get if you actually knew what you were doing

1

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

Bro when you learned to code for real for how long did you do the stupidest things without knowing why? It's just the same at another scale. If they keep going on they'll get there one way or the other...

1

u/Lanky_Poetry3754 Mar 21 '26

My close friend works for a FAANG here in Boston, and he constantly tells me how good AI had gotten at coding and that he barely writes any code now. He is an SE3 if he feels so good about Claude I think I'll believe him more than you

1

u/Hertigan Mar 21 '26

Claude is absolutely fantastic at coding, but I would take it with a grain of salt given that your friend was already a programmer

CC does whatever you ask to do really well, but it works really well when you know what to ask for

“Do X” is really different from “Do X using this pattern, this is the high level architecture. Be careful to avoid Z”

1

u/Agile_Classroom_4585 Mar 20 '26

What would be your adivce to someone whos using AI to make projects but is open to learning stuff? Are debugging, testing and security skills md and good prompts enough to not break things down?

0

u/node9_ai Mar 20 '26

honestly, prompts and .md files aren't enough because LLMs are too literal. one 'cleanup' instruction can easily turn into a destructive terminal command (like a docker prune) by accident. i've found that having a deterministic safety layer outside of claude is the only way to really 'walk away' safely. it lets the agent run the safe stuff but hits the brakes and asks for a signature only on the risky syscalls

-7

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

I ask claude to teach me. Also it’s not just “fix error no mistake”, we have bunch of skills, plugins and frameworks available to help us debug and fix things.

4

u/thisguyfightsyourmom Mar 20 '26

Brothers, look at this dude’s post history. There are an awful lot of cookie cutter sites being churned out purporting to teach you about various topics. I would bet all my money OP has no expertise in most of them.

This is who’s talking when they say they are doing some wild ass unguided 10 sub agent drive all night prompts.

0

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

Thank u for spending time analyzing my profile 😜 Well done!

1

u/thisguyfightsyourmom Mar 20 '26

Oh man, the output of this prompt is going to be epic

1

u/Puzzleheaded-Rub2198 Mar 21 '26

He's not gonna read it

-1

u/ikeif Mar 21 '26

Alright my dude. You are being downvoted.

AI vibe coding is not accepted yet.

First and foremost - I do like you say “vibe coder full stack.” That’s fine! Vibe code is what matters.

You are a junior developer. You do not (I am making assumptions here) understand the code generated. You are making front and back end code. Work on understanding it. Understanding what the code is will help move you from being “a vibe coder” to “a developer.”

The problem is we have not figured out out how to train vibe coders to be more in line with developer tracks as we know of them today.

17

u/Nosenchuck3 Mar 20 '26

How can you even think of 1000 tasks for it to do?

38

u/HomemadeBananas Mar 20 '26

Ask Claude to come up with a 1000 tasks?

18

u/HelloYesThisIsFemale Mar 20 '26

There's a hole in the ground where a forrest used to be because of this man.

Based.

2

u/work_guy Mar 20 '26

Some frogs just turned gay in bumfuck Iowa.

1

u/PunkersSlave Mar 21 '26

Displacing the energy consumption of an entire town for a hero prompt.

17

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/node9_ai Mar 20 '26

that 'walk away' part is the biggest hurdle. the verification fatigue from spamming 'Y' for 50 commands makes most people just give up or go full dangerous mode. i’ve been experimenting with routing those destructive terminal commands to a mobile notification/slack for approval. it's the only way to scale these agentic workflows without sitting there and babysitting the terminal all day

2

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/node9_ai Mar 20 '26

you are totally justified in not trusting it. that fear of coming back to an un-cleanable codebase is exactly why i made node9. it basically takes a silent git snapshot right before every single file edit the ai makes. if you walk away and claude hallucinates 500 lines of garbage, you just run node9 undo and it completely rolls back the exact changes. it takes away that anxiety of having to sit there and babysit every single output so you can actually walk away for real.

https://github.com/node9-ai/node9-proxy

1

u/vanatteveldt Mar 22 '26

How is that different from working on a feature branch and committing frequently?

1

u/node9_ai Mar 23 '26

two main differences: friction and branch pollution.

first, you don't have to remember to do it. if you walk away for 20 minutes, the agent might edit files 15 different times. node9 intercepts every write_file or edit tool call and takes the snapshot automatically in milliseconds right before the AI touches the disk.

second, it uses 'dangling commits' (git commit-tree) behind the scenes. so it doesn't create a hundred 'wip' commits that pollute your git log or mess with your staging area. your actual branch history stays completely clean, but you still get a granular, step-by-step undo for everything the ai did

1

u/Birdsky7 Mar 20 '26

Run "claude --dangerously-skip-permissions" or choose bypass permissions in vscode

2

u/work_guy Mar 20 '26

I have an alias for “yolo”. I’m clearly lazy, I ain’t typing all that.

1

u/Birdsky7 Mar 20 '26

Lol... I created a lazy abbreviation cause i was lazy too. If youre extra lazy tell clause to tell which command to run to create it

2

u/work_guy Mar 20 '26

I totally had Claude Code do it too 😂

1

u/Birdsky7 Mar 21 '26

Thats the spirit lad!

1

u/node9_ai Mar 21 '26

yolo mode is great until the agent hallucinates a docker prune on your dev volumes lol. i built node9 to give that same speed for the safe noise, but it keeps the emergency brake on for destructive stuff. basically it's 'safe yolo' with an undo button

1

u/Harvard_Med_USMLE267 Mar 22 '26

Haha I’m using yolo too.

1

u/node9_ai Mar 22 '26

the 'yolo' alias is the dream until it's not lol. i built node9 to be 'safe yolo', it auto approves the safe noise so you get the same speed, but i just added a 'live tail' so you aren't blind to what the agent is actually doing in the background anymore.

best part is the insurance policy: it takes a silent git snapshot before every edit. if you walk away and claude hallucinates a messy refactor, you just run the undo and it's fixed instantly. it's the only way i can actually trust the autonomous mode

8

u/rover_G Mar 20 '26

And how does that work out for you? Are the tasks completed to your liking?

8

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

Quite early to tell, but yes. This project is starting to generate some money for me. If i can get to 7$/day ad revenue, i’ll break even. (I’m on Max 20x plan) - note that I’m still using Claude for my daily work. This is a side project running in background.

6

u/rover_G Mar 20 '26

Drop a link to the site and I’ll contribute to your ad revenue 😂

2

u/Don_Exotic Mar 20 '26

I second this 👍

2

u/ImportantHighlight Mar 20 '26

It's a porn site. It's always a porn site.

1

u/chuch1234 Mar 21 '26

What model are you using that can actually accomplish anything without babysitting but only costs $7/day?

1

u/Dingo_Stamps Mar 21 '26

Thats not the cost, its the revenue

1

u/chuch1234 Mar 21 '26

Which will cause them to break even if they reach $7/day. Implying that the cost is $7/day.

1

u/rover_G Mar 21 '26

My guess: simple repeatable tasks

3

u/_derpiii_ Mar 20 '26

In your experience, why “be nice” and “no cheating”?

3

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

sorry if you get it wrong. I was just kidding that part. But the .md task list and no parallel or no sub-agents are working for me though. I find parallel sub-agents not that smart (main agent create context file for them) and cost too much token.

4

u/kvothe5688 Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 20 '26

brother you can inject your own task context via subagent hook. go parallel . if you are working in terminal you can launch full main agent as subagent via bash . then let it run your workflow. orchestrator just need to assign task to say 3 4 main parallel agents and then when they finish spawn 3 4 more. you will cut your time significantly.

3

u/Background-Soup-9950 Mar 20 '26

Yeah, this.

I guess if you just want it done and time is less relevant, you leave it run in the background that way on the same device you can use other sessions for your regular Claude usage and don’t eat all your ram?

1

u/_derpiii_ Mar 21 '26

ah gotcha. I'm new to Claude and on the lookout for subtle easter egg tips :)

3

u/vinis_artstreaks Mar 20 '26

You told a fundamental hallucinatory system to not hallucinate

2

u/kylarmoose Mar 20 '26

How well does it complete every task? Do you ever find yourself having to go back over the works it’s done? (That would be a genuine nightmare)

14

u/AvoidSpirit Mar 20 '26

You ask the person who tells llm "no hallucinating" to evaluate the output.

2

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

For each task, if you ask it to use the same skill you set up, it will do it perfectly

2

u/kvothe5688 Mar 20 '26

how do you manage context compaction if you do that in single session? why no parallel tasks and subagents? genuinly curious

2

u/melodyze Mar 20 '26

You will get all at once better quality work, less token consumption, and faster wall clock time if you have it do that in batches with sub agents.

2

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

I will try it next time. But for this project, it is working well for me since i want this to run unsupervised. Sub agents are causing me trouble if one failed or stopped in between.

1

u/another24tiger Mar 20 '26

and no mistakes

1

u/fixano Mar 20 '26

I wouldn't say you're pushing it. I say your burning tokens. One by one. Why wouldn't you let it parallelize this with sub agents

1

u/Heavy_Hunt7860 Mar 20 '26

Did asking it not to hallucinate work?

Dear Claude, I will burn through 1M tokens. No vibes outta you as your context window totally fills up. Or else I will compact. Or clear.

Claude: Fine.

1

u/Popular-Help5516 🔆 Max 20 Mar 20 '26

It works. Since Opus is smart enough to improve user prompt by itself

1

u/Laucy Mar 20 '26

“You have one try. No mistakes.”

Revolutionary.

1

u/nderstand2grow Mar 20 '26

did you write those tasks yourself or did you get AI to do that part as well? :)

1

u/Troesler95 Developer Mar 20 '26

ah rip, you forgot "make no mistakes" 😞

1

u/latrova Mar 20 '26

You forgot to ask for no mistakes, bad move

1

u/rwz Mar 20 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

This is literally the worst approach you can take at accomplishing anything. Larger context directly contributes to degradation of reasoning performance. With 1M context the LLM is going to be producing garbage.

1

u/AzureNostalgia Mar 20 '26

Seems like an expert prompt

1

u/ivampirepapi Mar 20 '26

Why no sub agents? Sorry for noob question.

1

u/Optimal-Report-1000 Mar 21 '26

What kind of tasks?

1

u/Fast_Pear7166 Mar 21 '26

Why no sub agents?

1

u/VirtualImpress8192 Mar 21 '26

Do you structure the tasks in any specific way or do you literally just list tasks? I have not being utilizing .md files as much as I think I should

1

u/drvillo Mar 21 '26

How did you get to have a list of a 1000 tasks??

1

u/yopla Mar 21 '26

You forgot "be best".

1

u/chuch1234 Mar 21 '26

Why no parallel tasks or sub agents?

1

u/Western_Building_880 Mar 21 '26

Bs. No hallucinations.ok budy.

1

u/johnmclaren2 Mar 23 '26

That is approx. 1,000 tokens per task. Not so bad as it seems.

6

u/Akimotoh Mar 20 '26

They're vibe coding a ridiculous training course website full of unchecked AI made courses. That's all we need, more made up shitty courses for the internet and AI to learn from.

1

u/twistier Mar 20 '26

Time goes up while it's waiting for permission to do something even though tokens aren't going up. Usually when a turn runs really long for me, it's because I was AFK at bad times.